Hey, I tried the new WiP, and it's a definite improvement. Adam looks gorgeous, and James doesn't look bad either (can't wait to see Jake and Juan in this style); it's great to be able to join the banter with Jake's group; and while I'm still not a fan of Dan, he feels more obnoxious than predatory now.
I do still feel that the Elliot/Robert issue can come out of nowhere if the player doesn't visit the frat enough; for something that ends up dominating the end of the story, it feels as though it should have been set up more on the non-frat routes.
My main issue, though, is that it's pretty hard to romance
anyone.
I managed to miss Jake's route, and as far as I could tell, the thing that I had to do to get it was to do DDR with Hannah and vaguely tell her how I felt about Jake, which caused him to ask me out. Is that a switch that needs to be flipped, or did it just provide a boost to get me over the threshold? Likewise, I had no luck getting with either Juan or Adam, despite spending the entire story with them. While I agree that Adam makes sense as an ultra-difficult semi-secret character, I do feel that the other characters could maybe do with being made a little easier. For one thing, would it be possible to ask out Jake or Juan directly? Maybe after their respective coming out/self-acceptance scenes (and presumably with a lower required relationship)? I get that you want to write something more realistic than "you spend some time with character X and now you are boyfriends", but "asking another gay guy out, and thus getting him to see you as more than a friend" is also pretty realistic. I guess to compare (again) to Coming Out on Top, the majority of routes are easy to get onto (if not easy to stay on), and it's generally reasonably easy to tell approximately where you messed up, if not exactly how. In this game, I have to go through dozens of choices before I get to see how effective they are, and then have to work out exactly which ones I got wrong last time.
I do really enjoy the game; I just feel that the difficulty could be lowered somewhat.
Also,
I note that Elliot, Nate, and Nikhil all have body hair options...
Are they all romanceable, too, now?